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Vladi­mir
Putin cruised to victory Sunday for another six-year presidential term after an
election that was long on spectacle and short on suspense.

From the Arctic to the International Space
Station, Russia rolled out an elaborate election-day display designed to show
the breadth of Putin’s public support as he extended his tenure for a fourth
term to 2024.

Putin’s
opponents on Sunday’s ballot included a nationalist, a Communist and two
liberals. But Putin barely campaigned, opposition activist Alexei Navalny was
barred from the ballot, and reports of ballot-stuffing and people being ordered
to vote by their employers rolled in throughout the day.

With about
two-thirds of the ballots counted, more than 75 percent were for Putin,
according to the Central Election Commission. The runner-up was Communist Party
candidate Pavel Grudinin, with 12.7 percent.

“Success
awaits us!” Putin told supporters in central Moscow. “Together, we will get to
work on a great, massive scale, in the name of Russia.”

The biggest
question as Russians went to the polls on Sunday was the level of turnout, and
uncertainty on the final tally lingered into the night in Moscow. While
independent surveys show that most Russians continue to approve of Putin as
president, a lack of suspense or popular opposition candidates threatened to
keep people home. The Kremlin, analysts say, was looking for high turnout to
deliver legitimacy for another Putin term.

Even as the
commission reported results, throughout the evening there was no updated
information on turnout. At 6 p.m. Moscow time, three hours before polls closed,
the election commission said that nationwide turnout stood at 59.9 percent —
just above the level in the 2012 election at that time.

Russian
cities have been plastered with billboards touting Sunday’s election — “Your
country, our president, our choice!” Some cities made public transportation
free on Sunday, and social media posts from Russia’s far-flung regions showed
free food and giveaways at polling places. In Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East,
the regional government organized a food festival to coincide with the vote
that, at one polling place, was to include a “presidential breakfast” featuring
skim-milk oatmeal with regional pine nuts.

Putin cast
his ballot at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Asked what result he
was hoping for, he responded: “Any that gives me the right to fulfill the duty
of president.”

Russian
state TV broadcast images of lines of Russian beachgoers voting in Thailand, a
polling place in the mountains of Dagestan, mothers casting their ballots at a
maternity ward, and a helicopter delivering ballots to remote settlements in
the Arctic. A Russian on the space station was reported to have voted while in
orbit. A state TV journalist reporting live from the southern city of
Rostov-on-Don cast his ballot on camera — “I have done my civic duty,” he said.

The election
was being held on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea — a
move core to Putin’s domestic brand as a fearless defender of Russian
interests. The Ukrainian territory that Russia seized in March 2014 was voting
Sunday for the Russian president for the first time after an intense propaganda
campaign on the territory warning of war and same-sex marriage as the possible
consequences if Putin’s power weakened.

Critics
described the vote as a charade, and opposition activist Navalny has been
urging his supporters to boycott the vote ever since he was barred from the
ballot in December. The independent Golos election-monitoring group broadcast a
video from the city of Krasnodar that it said showed people being forced to
vote by their employers. “They told us at work” to go vote, one of them said.

“Tell yourself: I don’t want to be a part of
this,” Navalny urged his 2 million Twitter followers ahead of the vote. “I
don’t want elections without a choice. I won’t vote for Putin or for those whom
Putin picked as his sparring partners.”

Online,
videos of ballot-stuffing at polling stations across Russia surfaced throughout
the day. One such video, taken outside Moscow, showed two election officials
repeatedly dropping ballots into a box in the center of the room.

The Moscow Region Election Commission later
said that both of the women seen in the video are facing criminal charges and
that the ballot box has been sealed and will not be counted. Other videos
published Sunday showed ballot-stuffing in Chechnya, Dagestan and the Sakha
Republic.

While
several outspoken Putin opponents were on the ballot, including liberals Ksenia
Sobchak and Grigory Yavlinsky, many potential voters who dislike Putin stayed
home to avoid legitimizing the election. Daria Suslina, 20, said she decided to
skip the chance to vote in a presidential election for the first time in her
life after getting numerous appeals to do so by text message and at work.

“The
pressure to go and vote was disgusting,” said Suslina, a student who works part
time at a state research and manufacturing company. “The whole thing — the
elections today — seems so artificial. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

At a polling
station in central Moscow, a rush of midday voters lined up nearly out the door
of a school and filled up three floors of steps to a crowded room with a
handful of voting booths. Outside the polling station, a 31-year-old who
identified herself by her first name and patronymic, Anna Sergeyevna, said she
voted for Putin.

“I like how
he’s led the country for a long time,” she said. “He showed that our team is
the good one.”

Election day
was even complete with allegations of foreign meddling. A cyberattack
originating in 15 countries hit the website of the Central Election Commission
overnight, according to commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova, the Interfax news
agency reported.

As with
prior elections, the elections commission rolled out foreign “observers” to
testify to the fairness of the vote. Among them: Kline Preston IV, a Nashville
lawyer who has done business in Russia and previously said he introduced a
prominent Russian senator to the president of the National Rifle Association.
Preston was in Crimea earlier, where he told local journalists that “Crimea
was, is, and will always be part of Russia.”

“In a lot of
ways we’ve got something to learn from them,” Preston said in a phone interview
from the city of Vladimir outside Moscow, where he was touring polling places.
“I think there’s a lot more fraud in our system.”

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